[4] When the artist first started creating the larger-scale collages she is now well known for, she more heavily relied on the usage of text, images with a pop art influence, and, sometimes, effects including embroidery, beads, and mats on the surface of the fabric.

The tapestry depicts the city-scape of Johannesburg, reduced to miniature proportions in comparison to the graceful but towering figure of Zangewa, who appears nude except for a banner encircling her body.

[3] Billie Zangewa works primarily with raw silk offcuts in intricate hand-stitched collages, creating figurative compositions that explore her intersectional identity in the contemporary context and challenge the historical stereotyping, objectification and exploitation of the black female body.

Speaking with Jareh Das in Ocula Magazine, the artist explained, 'I feel that at present, we live in a time blighted by a lot of violence and transgression in different forms that we inflict on one other as a society.

'[9] Zangewa's 2014 work Constant Gardener is owned by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D C.[10] The textured printing paper awakened her interest in the materiality of surfaces, and when she moved to Johannesburg she found her muse: the city.

She uses self-referentiality as a conceptual framework within which to epitomize the contemporary African woman and contribute to her redefinition in societies in which patriarchy and reactionary views continue to work against the liberation of women.

Although her tapestries are autobiographical, she finds recourse in the shaping of a collective identity, as in Midnight Aura and Angelina Rising-titles that reference the names given to wax prints by the Dutch fabric company Vlisco.

The African woman depicted in Zangewa's tapestries, who has "experienced modernity" in the words of Yinka Shonibare MBE, has had to reclaim herself: passive and subjected to the desires of men, she has become the agent of seduction performed as a conscious and voluntary act.